Sales to LACKINGTON’S, CORVIDAE, SPECTRAL REALMS

Though it’s possible I still looked productive to most everyone else, I went through a long spell in 2013 and the first half of 2014 where I wasn’t selling any new work. (These things happen to writers, heh. Perhaps worth noting, if you don’t believe me, that all the stories that appeared in Unseaming were written in 2012 or earlier.) In mid-2014 my dry spell thawed (mangled metaphor!) and it appears things remain too warm for now for the drought to return.

I’m honored that the following places will showcase works of mine in months to come:

• Lackington’s has accepted my new short story “The Spider Tapestries,” a surreal piece that’s perhaps set in a fantasy milieu, or an alien world, or maybe even a far-future dreamscape. The story’s scheduled to appear in October.

• Rhonda Parrish’s avian-themed anthology Corvidae will feature my new short story “The Cruelest Team Will Win.” It’s a dark fantasy from the same world visited in my stories “The Hiker’s Tale” and “Follow the Wounded One.” This will be the first time I’ve had a third story in a series published, I’m quite thrilled about that; I’m also thrilled to return to this setting and these characters. I’ve written a whole novel (still unpublished) set in this universe. “The Cruelest Team Will Win” takes place after the events of the novel, but makes use of one of the novel’s nastiest villains. My thanks to Rhonda for the opportunity to do this.

• Not new to me but new to the rest of the world: a poem I co-wrote years ago with C.S.E. Cooney, “Toujours Il Coûte Trop Cher,” sold last week to S.T. Joshi for use in his dark poetry journal Spectral Realms. The topic of the poem was Claire’s idea, rooted in the curious fact that famed martyred heroine Joan of Arc and reviled serial killer Gilles de Rais once fought side by side against the British. Back when we first wrote the poem, we tried it out a few places, it didn’t sell; we set it down, contemplating whether or not it might need more work, and let it sit, and sit, and sit. And then, this month, we dusted it off after all that time in storage, tried it on S.T. first thing and he snatched it up. I guess we just needed to wait for the right market to come along.